Rachel Lawler, defendant pro-se for the defense. I will first deliver a brief sentencing statement on behalf of my codefendants and myself. I will then speak about my individual circumstances that led me to participate in our January action. Several of my codefendants will then do the same.

I. Your honor, our act on January 17^th was not an act committed with criminal malice; it was an act of pure conscience. We were driven by our conviction that the barbaric and retributive death penalty system is an affront to our society and should be abolished immediately.

We will accept the sentence that you deem to be appropriate, given the circumstances and our character. But let it be noted that we are not accepting it in complacence because we believe we were in the wrong. On the contrary – we hold firm in our belief that we were exercising our first amendment right to free speech by peacefully and nonviolently taking a stand against the death penalty.

II. I offer the following facts not as an attempt to mitigate my sentence, but rather to explain what led me to participate in the action for which I stood trial today.

I am a pre-law student, with the intention of attending law school in the fall of 2008. I therefore feel obligated to inform the court that I have the utmost deference for the document that our Courts are supposed to uphold and enforce – the United States Constitution.

That being said, I simply cannot consent to a legislated practice that flies in the face of all the ideals imbued within our Constitution that the Framers wanted our Nation and its laws to embody.

And I believe that inaction and silence are equivalent to consent.

I cannot consent to a practice egregiously retributive, a practice so systemically broken that it deprives my fellow human beings of a plethora of legal and human rights, ultimately depriving them of their right to life. If I do not act, then on my hands will be the blood of each person who is put to death in my name, on my behalf, in an attempt, albeit a horribly failed one, to make my country a safer place. Substantial and meaningful change was never affected by means of complacency and inaction.

When my time is not spent furthering my education of the law, it is spent in furtherance of justice in my community while recognizing the human dignity and spirit within each and every one of us. Aside from my work to abolish the death penalty, I volunteer as part of my state capitol’s Community Justice Center where I do re-entry work with offenders, helping them to successfully reintegrate into my community without reoffending – simultaneously making the community a safer place and reinstilling the dignity that was taken from them. This coming fall, I will begin to serve as a volunteer Guardian Ad Litem for the State of Vermont.

Your honor, if I were to consent to the death penalty, it would be detrimental to the true meaning of justice and to all that I do in the name thereof.

We, as a society, cannot simply discard that which we hate. That may be easy to do, but, ultimately, it will not bring about a more just society. We are better than that which we become when we take the life of another. Our ‘evolving standards of decency’ have moved us beyond this anachronistic practice we conduct in the middle of the night. As long as informed citizens remain in silent consent to the death penalty, as long as we continue to extinguish lives in the name of justice – then we will continue to create more victims and more pain; we will continue to show, by example, that violence is the answer. And it most certainly is not.